You may have heard of Don Rumsfeld's
Rules. Soon after taking office the Pentagon published the collected wisdom of the new Secretary of Defense. Here is a good one:
Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance.
Good advice and I hope he takes it soon.
But here is the thing that bothers me. The rules were posted 5 days after taking office on Jan 25, 2001 and removed from the web Oct 20, 2002. The rules were modified exactly once. On Sept 10, 2001, a new rule was added to the end of the list which states
"America ain't what's wrong with the world." (Harry Golden)
I came across this while reading the rules and did a bit of sleuthing on my own. Please forgive my speculation about Rumsfeld's motives based on nothing but a date and a new rule, but he must have thought it was very important to insert this new rule and I wonder why.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the date bugs me. Why did Mr. Rumsfeld think he needed to justify America's role in the world on Sept 10, 2001? What would propel adding the assertion that we were not doing anything wrong into this clearly very important list? Did he know something bad was going on?
I used the "Wayback Machine" to check the various versions of the document linked at the DOD press release here Rumsfeld's Rules.
Wayback's versions of Rumsfeld's Rules
Here is a link to the edited file
If your not familiar the Wayback machine, it is an archive of all the internet pages posted over time. You can use it to compare how web pages have been modified over time.
The file "rumsfeldsrules.pdf" itself was updated between 1 AM and 5 AM on Sept 11, 2001. Here is a pic of the file properties from acrobat reader: